Six Duke Kunshan University professors have received research funding from the National Natural Science Foundation of China, one of the country’s most prestigious research funding programs.
The recipients are Heejin Lee, Zuchuan Li, Bing Luo, Shixin Xu, Junjie Zhang, and Xinyu Zhang.
Heejin Lee
Lee’s research focuses on inverse problems and spectral methods for partial differential equations, with applications in medical imaging and non destructive testing. She has worked on the mathematical reconstruction of shapes and parameters in complex media, particularly through qualitative methods. Her work has been published in leading journals such as Inverse Problems, SIAM Journal on Applied Mathematics and Inverse Problems and Imaging. Her teaching interests include foundational and advanced courses in pure and applied mathematics.
In addition to her research and teaching, she has served as a reviewer for scholarly journals in the fields of inverse problems and applied analysis.
She holds a Ph.D. in mathematics from Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey–New Brunswick. Before joining Duke Kunshan University, she was a Golomb visiting assistant professor at Purdue University in the United States.
Zuchuan Li
Li’s research focuses on machine learning, Bayesian statistics, and their applications to environmental data science. Current research interests include scientific machine learning, Bayesian statistics, and their applications to constrain the mechanisms of aquatic carbon cycle and primary productivity. His research has been published in leading academic journals including Nature, Nature Communications, Nature Climate Change and NeurIPS. He has been awarded the NASA Earth and space science fellowship and the WHOI postdoctoral scholarship.
His teaching interests span data science, statistics, and machine learning. He holds a Ph.D. from Duke University.
Bing Luo
Luo’s research focuses on federated and edge learning, as well as LLM-based agentic systems. His work has been published in leading journals and conferences, including IEEE JSAC, TCOM, TMC, INFOCOM, ICDCS, ACM MobiHoc, and ICLR. His team developed and open-sourced FedKit, a cross-platform on-device federated learning framework for Android and iOS, and deployed it in FedCampus, DKU’s privacy-preserving smart-campus mobile platform. The team also developed MobileFineTuner, an open-source framework for on-device LLM fine-tuning on mobile devices, and EdgeFlowerTune, an open-source benchmark for federated LLM fine-tuning on real edge devices, in collaboration with researchers at the University of Cambridge and Flower Labs. His group also created and launched ChatDKU (chatdku.com), a RAG- and agent-based AI assistant for the DKU community.
Prior to joining DKU, Luo was a joint postdoctoral researcher at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen) and Yale University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Melbourne, where he was awarded the Kenneth Myers Memorial Scholarship and the Robert Bage Memorial Scholarship.
Luo is currently a visiting fellow at Clare Hall, University of Cambridge, where he is conducting his pre-tenure sabbatical in Fall 2026. He is a senior member of IEEE and an honorary assistant professor at the University of Hong Kong.
Shixin Xu
Xu’s interdisciplinary research combines applied mathematics, scientific computing and data science to address challenges in biology, medicine and industry. His work has advanced understanding of complex systems involving fluid flow, biological transport and computational modeling.
His recent research topics include semipermeable interface flows, electrohydrodynamics of droplets, reactive and active interfacial transport, glymphatic and optic nerve microcirculation, chronic disease risk prediction and parameter optimization in industrial systems.
Xu has published widely in applied mathematics, computational science, biophysics and data science, with recent papers appearing in the Journal of Computational Physics, Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering, SIAM Journal on Numerical Analysis, Pattern Recognition and the International Conference on Machine Learning.
Xu received his Ph.D. from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), followed by postdoctoral appointments at the National University of Singapore, the University of Notre Dame, the University of California, Riverside, and the Fields Institute (Toronto).
Junjie Zhang
Zhang is professor of environmental science and policy and director of the Initiative for Sustainable Investment at DKU. He is also and a professor in the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University. He founded and directed Duke Kunshan’s Environmental Research Center and International Master of Environmental Policy Program. Before that, he was an associate professor in the School of Global Policy and Strategy at the University of California, San Diego. He was also a Volkswagen Visiting Chair in Sustainability in Schwarzman College at Tsinghua University.
His recent research focuses on empirical issues in energy transition, climate change, and green finance. He has received funding from various sources, including scientific foundations, multilateral banks, corporations, financial institutions, and philanthropic foundations.
He holds a B.S. from the Renmin University of China, a B.S. and an M.S. from Tsinghua University, and a Ph.D. from Duke University.
Xinyu Zhang
Zhang conducts research in global health at DKU. She is also the associate director for research of the Innovation Lab for Vaccine Delivery Research (VaxLab) at DKU. Her research interests and experience center on vaccine delivery research in China and other low- and middle-income countries (with a focus on strengthening national immunization programs and vaccine financing), and health policy and health system reform in China (with a focus on payment system reform and health services research). She has published a WHO report and peer-reviewed papers as first or corresponding author in leading journals such as The Lancet Regional Health – Western Pacific, BMJ Global Health, and Social Science & Medicine. She has participated in multiple research projects supported by NSFC, Gates Foundation, and the National Healthcare Security Administration of China, among others.
She holds a Bachelor of Management in Public Service Administration and a Ph.D. in Social Medicine and Health Management from the School of Public Health, Fudan University in China. She completed a postdoctoral appointment there from 2022 to 2024. She also served as a postdoctoral associate at Duke Global Health Institute, Duke University, U.S., in 2023.
